English Chess Forum

Hello Brian I've only just started reading this stuff. If you are going ELO type, how do you plan to ensure consistency across junior grades where some play a high proportion of adults and others play a much smaller proportion of adults? I'm not exactly sure of the problem you are concerned about. ...

The February update was published on 5th February. LOL. He means the update due on Feb 29th And when is it appearing, please? If ever....... If things go well over the weekend, then I expect the March update to be published in the first half of next week. The plan is to move back to month end updat...

.......There is no ground swell opinion for either changing to monthly updates or a system that is incomprehensible to the majority of players. You don't see the correspondence I deal with on the current approach! The junior algorithm is particularly difficult. The timetable for submission is not s...

The February update was published on 5th February.

There is no schedule to change the six monthly cycle.

It will remain in place until there is a stable robust alternative. That alternative will include simplification of result submission, even though we haven't yet sorted out what that might be.

Brian Valentine
Manager of ECF grading

"After spending many months looking at the data, I think the hypothesis that juniors tend to improve is conclusively proved against the alternate that playing strength is constant." Are you sure? .... Being sure is not a concept fitting with statistics theory! It is clear from both senior and junio...

The k factor will be 20 except that in a month where a junior player has outperformed expectation, then the k factor will be 40. My impression based on a few seconds of mental arithmetic is that a junior whose playing strength is constant and who plays ten games each month might be expected to gain...

In most circumstances, one thing that reduces volatility is simply by increasing frequency of lists while not changing the k-factor.

I have placed a proposal for monthly grading on the main ECF website under grading matters. I intend to begin an FAQ document today.

While I normally try to refrain from being critical of volunteers who do their best in sometimes challenging circumstances, I really do think the consultation on grading changes circulated with the latest ECF newsletter is wholly inadequate. I've had experience of a number of consultation exercises...

I might be saying the same thing as Richard Bates but don't assume that if the theoretical predicted results leave the ratings in the same state that that shows that the ratings or model probabilities are correct. For a set of ratings and results there is more than one set of model probabilities th...

Picking up a few points in recent posts. I share Richard Bates concerns about acceptance of a radical change to Elo. However the ECF current approach to new entrants/juniors tends to breakdown with the smaller samples generated by monthly lists. The approach can be very volatile and explaining the i...

In December (25th) I noted that three of seven congresses I had taken part in had not appeared in the list of events submitted to the ECF Grading team. Only one of these has appeared in the following three and a half weeks. One of those missing was fairly early in the season, end of September, whil...

Not having long enough to seal a move is a problem. Especially a match not starting on time on an overrunning junior club. There are exceptions of course on starts. I think ECF will have a problem in implementing a new grading system with instructing leagues on how they can play their games. Quite ...

The deadline for July (e.g.) is normally about 15th July. Leagues are normally finished in the middle of May, so a league grader has maybe 6 weeks to get the results in. I suspect there's a heavy element of graders working to a deadline, and if the deadline was tighter (as it is in January), they'd...